Peter Lewis
Denise Lewis |job = NSA employee |path = Proxy Killer Hacker Stalker Abductor |mo = Drugging Varied proxy murder |signature = Adding burning sage to drugs used on victims |victims = See below |status = At large |actor = Bodhi Elfman |appearance = Mr. Scratch }} "You do what I say." Peter Lewis, a.k.a. "Mr. Scratch", is a serial killer by proxy, hacker, and stalker who first appeared in Season Ten of Criminal Minds. He later escaped with twelve other serial killers in Season Eleven and currently remains at large as of Season Twelve. Background Peter was born with extremely high intelligence and was a math genius. His parents ran a group home that took in several children who were waiting for adoption. During the day-care sex-abuse hysteria of the 1980s and early 1990s, some of the children made claims that Peter's father Neil would dress himself and the other children as the Devil, causing people to believe there was child abuse and Satanic rituals occurring inside the home. At first, the claims were met with skepticism from police, but a core member of the Believe the Children movement, a psychologist named Doctor Susannah Regan, convinced them to believe them. As a result, the group home was shut down and Neil was sent to jail, where other inmates killed him for being a pedophile while the investigation was still pending. Peter eventually moved on with his life and attended Harvard University, taking the top classes for mathematics. Upon graduating, he was immediately hired by the National Security Agency, which would always hire math geniuses because it was too dangerous for them to work anywhere else. In 1992, the FBI's Lanning Report helped the BAU and other federal agencies evaluate Regan's work and debunk it. This left her credibility in ruin and forced her to go into witness protection after she began receiving numerous death threats. Realizing the closure of the group home and his father's death were all for nothing, Peter began seeking revenge against Regan and the children who were responsible for the scandal. Mr. Scratch "Do you see Mr. Scratch''?"'' After forcing Daniel Karras, Christine McNeil, and Larry Merrin to hallucinate Mr. Scratch and kill their loved ones, the BAU notice a pattern in the interrogations and investigate the occurrences. Peter then targets Bill Kinderman and attempts to make him kill his son, but Bill's paternal instinct overrides his hypnosis and he commits suicide instead. Reaching his endgame, Peter hacks into the witness protection database in the BAU headquarters in Quantico to find Regan, causing a widespread blackout in the process. Reid deduces from the code used to hack into the Quantico database that the unsub works for the NSA. Appealing to Tony Axelrod, an NSA employee, Hotch identifies the unsub and who he is targeting next. He goes to Regan's house, but finds that Peter is already there. Peter forces Regan to kill herself in front of Hotch, then drugs him and talks to him in an attempt to make him see Mr. Scratch. As they talk, Hotch deduces that Peter was in Susannah's interviews as well, giving testimony against his father. At first, he is enraged by this, but Peter then takes it as a challenge to get into Hotch's head. He makes him hallucinate Peter killing Reid, Rossi, and Morgan; and then tries to goad him into shooting the real Reid and Rossi as they try to enter the house. However, Hotch overrides the suggestion and tries to shoot Peter. Dodging the bullet, Peter retreats into an attic and waits for Morgan and JJ to arrive. When they do, he surrenders immediately, satisfied that he had gotten into Hotch's head. As he is put into a police car, he smiles at a watching Hotch, taps his temple, and smiles tauntingly at him. As the car leaves, Peter looks over his shoulder to take one last look at Hotch. The Storm "The world needs to know what kind of man Aaron Hotchner really is." Peter briefly reappears in the episode when Hotch is arrested under the suspicion of conspiracy. During Hotch's interrogation, he is shown a video recording of Peter explaining to a federal interrogator Hotch's experience while being drugged. According to Peter, Hotch started to laugh while hallucinating his entire team getting killed, and he goes on to claim that he became scared of what Hotch could do to his team and even his own son. According to federal interrogator Timothy Ritchie, this interrogation prompted the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct an independent investigation into Hotch's recent leadership abilities. After the team closes the case and proves Hotch's innocence, they receive word that prison breaks occurred in three different states: thirteen serial killers managed to escape and Peter is one of them. It turns out that he had been involved with the people who framed Hotch, and that his testimony against Hotch was part of his escape plan. The Crimson King After Peter escapes from prison, he changes his victimology to people in Tempe, Arizona, who suffered from dissociative identity disorder. At some point, Peter manages to abduct Daniel Cullen, a.k.a. "The Crimson King", who is another escapee. He attends a support group in Arizona State University under Reid's name, and targets Brian Phillips. He abducts and drugs Brian, makes him believe that he is the Crimson King and forces him to copy Cullen's M.O. Peter has a drugged Brian carve "BAU" into his stomach, making it appear that Brian was a victim of Cullen's who had escaped, which prompts the local police to summon the BAU team. After Brian commits several crimes while in that induced state and then escapes from a hospital, he returns to Peter, who invites him inside the house he purchased, has him lay down on a surgery table, and drugs him again. Afterwards, Peter tells Brian that he has to go, but not before he shows him Cullen, whom Peter abducted recently. Peter tells Brian that Cullen thinks he is the Crimson King and asks him what he will do about it, then leaves Brian to torture Cullen. At the end of the episode, Peter is seen in another hideout looking at several files. He finds the name of his next victim, Desmond Holt, who lives in Franklin, Tennessee. Peter says "There you are", draws a circle around Desmond's full name and address, and smiles. Modus Operandi Peter targeted people who lived at his father's group home as children during the scandal, specifically those who testified against his father and were responsible for putting him away. After finding the victims, presumably by using his job to access the country's adoption records, he would drug them with a mixture of two powerful dissociative agents (sevoflurane and scopolamine) he planted into the air-ventilation systems of their homes, presumably while no one was home. These drugs caused them to hallucinate about Mr. Scratch and lash out violently at the person next to them, which would always be a loved one living in the same house. These people would be stabbed to death with knives by the drugged victims, who would then slip out of their psychotic episodes with barely any memory of what they were actually doing. He would later force his true target, Susannah Regan, to commit suicide, and later held Hotch hostage with a knife and the latter's FBI-issued sidearms. He would later have Hotch use one of these sidearms in an attempt to kill Rossi and Reid. Part of his signature was also mixing the drugs with the scent of burning sage, a reference to the burning sage Regan would have in her office when she interviewed Peter and the other children who testified against Peter's father, telling them that the aroma made it safe to talk about Mr. Scratch. Following his escape, Peter shifted his targets, focusing on people who suffered from dissociative identity disorder and attended a support group at Arizona State University. He first drugged one such person, Brian Phillips, and had him believe he was Daniel Cullen, a.k.a. "The Crimson King". Peter then had Brian commit several crimes under this induced state until the BAU's attention was caught. Profile No official profile of Lewis was made by the BAU. However, Hotch briefly described the unsub as being too psychologically unstable for the NSA to hire, but it did so anyway due to his expertise with computers. He would have broken into adoption records before in search of a particular person. Known Victims Personal Victims *2015: **April 14, Derry, Maine: Daniel Karras **April 17, Roswell, Georgia: Christine McNeil **April 19, Topeka, Kansas: Larry Merrin **April 21, unspecified location in Virginia: Bill Kinderman **April 22, Columbia, Maryland: The standoff at the Regan home: ***Doctor Susannah Regan ***Aaron Hotchner *2016: **Late September-Early October: Tempe, Arizona: ***Brian Phillips ***Daniel Cullen Victims by Proxy The following were attacked by his drugged victims *2015: **April 14, Derry, Maine: Daniel Karras' unnamed adoptive mother **April 17, Roswell, Georgia: Christine McNeil's unnamed boyfriend **April 19, Topeka, Kansas: Tabitha Merrin **April 21, unspecified location in Virginia: Jimmy Kinderman **April 22, Columbia, Maryland: David Rossi and Spencer Reid *2016: **Late September-Early October: Tempe, Arizona: The attacks committed by Brian Phillips : ***Chelsea Carter ***Officer Chet Dewey ***Daniel Cullen Notes *Peter is similar to serial killer Blake Wells in the sense that both had M.O.'s involving the drugging of their victims in order to control their minds and that their crimes involved their fathers in some way (Peter's father was killed in prison, while Blake's father abandoned him and later abused him). *Peter is also similar to poisoner Edward Hill, as both created sophisticated drug cocktails that triggered psychotic breaks in otherwise mentally healthy people. In one case, a victim attacked his son while in the midst of a psychotic break, nearly killing him. *Peter is the third unsub who was able to successfully hack in Garcia's system, the first two being Randall Garner and John Curtis. He is also the first unsub to stage a direct attack against the BAU headquarters' computer and electrical systems in Quantico. *''Mr. Scratch'' appears to be similar to The Mirror Man, a fictional entity of creepypasta lore featured early on in Season Ten. Both were supernatural beings who were characterized as having clawed hands. *The two drugs used by Lewis to control his victims' minds would not have worked in the same capacity as they were portrayed in the episode. Sevoflurane is a common dental anesthetic, and has to be inhaled directly via breathing apparatus, such as a mask or a nose tube, for it to achieve a noticeable effect. Scopolamine only exists in a liquid or powder form, making administration via air vents implausible, and it takes at least ten minutes to start taking effect when it is injected directly, or up to four hours if absorbed through the skin. These discrepancies may have been intentionally implemented by the writing staff to avoid real-life copycat incidents. *In The Storm, Peter stated that his drugging attacks and proxy murders occurred in March 2015. However, that is an error, as the crimes occurred in April in accordance with Mr. Scratch's airing. Appearances *Season Ten **Mr. Scratch *Season Eleven **Internal Affairs **The Storm *Season Twelve **The Crimson King **Taboo Category:Criminal Minds Characters Category:Criminals Category:Season Ten Criminals Category:Proxy Killers Category:Hackers Category:Revenge Killers Category:Stalkers Category:Criminals at Large Category:Recurring Characters Category:Season Twelve Criminals Category:Abductors